


running if you call my name

by benwvatt



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-05 18:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11583684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/benwvatt/pseuds/benwvatt
Summary: He is in Tampa and he has missed her so much, he has to process her voice twice in his head.Yet another Coral Palms fic, complete with a proper Peraltiago welcome back (aka sex.)





	running if you call my name

**Author's Note:**

> title from HAIM's "running if you call my name." it is a blessing of a song.

Nobody told Jake Peralta how crushing the quiet could become. When he could only hear the cicadas screeching at the brink of 3 A.M., he simply kept his mouth shut and tried to distract his addled brain. Tampa, Florida smelled exactly the way he imagined: all oil-based sunscreen and sea-salt humidity, acrid in the air, combining with the dust and heat already present.

In the back of his makeshift house 一 sometimes he could barely differentiate between the past of his reality and his desperate, false livelihood 一 Jake kept a yellowed calendar.

Its pages were wrinkled from the time he tried to use a humidifier (at that point, he’d do anything to fall asleep in this wretched place), but the highlight of most every day was crossing off another box and tallying all the days he spent without the comfort of his old life.

He waited a hundred and eighty-two days to see Amy Santiago.

All that spare time was devoted to dreaming, hoping, desperately crossing his fingers 一 maybe, just maybe, he’d get out of this earlier than expected. Every lie he told under his breath, every calculated sentence WITSEC fed him to spit back out, was all for her.

* * *

Amy Santiago is no longer Jake Peralta’s significant other. She is a colleague. A detective. A worker bee. The FBI hides all the traces of her relationship with Jake to keep them both safe. It’s for the best, she knows, but she can’t stand to see them reduced like this.

Instead of people, they are confidential information. Two unpaired case files, clad in manila folders, locked in a cabinet somewhere. Jake and Amy become Jacob and Amelia.

Jacob Peralta is Jewish-American. He is five-foot-ten, brown-haired and brown-eyed. All his arrests as a policeman, formerly held in glory, are stripped down to statistics and a badge number.

Jake Peralta is not the same person.

He is half-Jewish, and insists on buying his mother eight Hanukkah presents every year. Yes, Jake’s five-foot-ten, but is arguably taller when he wears his most overpriced sneakers to the doctor’s office (Amy remembers he refused to take his shoes off the last time the nurse took his height and weight.) His eyes _are_ admittedly brown, there’s no arguing that one, but the FBI doesn’t know how they shine and soften once he looks at someone he loves.

Paperwork will never tell Jake Peralta’s story. Bar graphs and pie charts can’t compare to his cop tales, inside jokes he’ll never get over. If Jake could see his file now, Amy thinks, he would curse.

All that work gone down the drain, filling out flimsy spreadsheets of arrest records and hours of overtime. It’s not the same, Amy knows. She takes a deep breath before picking up (yet another) manila folder, its conspiracies barely held together by paper clips.

Amy Santiago cannot solve the only case she cares about 一 that of Jimmy “The Butcher” Figgis 一 so she averts her gaze and distracts herself the only way she can.

In the six months Jake is missing, Amy racks up hundreds of hours of overtime. Of course, it can’t compare to just a minute with him.

* * *

When he sees her again, his chest seizes. Jake can’t remember exactly what to think, what he was expecting when he heard the pitter-patter of footsteps outside, but one look at her face renders him breathless.

He is in Tampa and Amy Santiago is with him, just as exhilarated as ever.

He is in Tampa and he has missed her so much, he has to process her voice twice in his head. Please, please, this can’t be another mirage, another voice in his mind, another trick of smoke and mirrors because his brain can’t cope without her presence.

It’s her.

Every word he knew flies out of his mind in a hopeless frenzy. Their conversation is one of stutters, a jilted, chaotic bundle of interruptions, but it’s _theirs._

That’s all he’s wanted. Amy Santiago is the only dream he’s managed to cling onto over these last hundred and eighty-two days. Her hair is swept into its trademark ponytail, her pantsuit easily replaced by an NYPD bulletproof vest.

Time hasn’t stopped for the two of them.

He’s endlessly wondered how she is. Maybe she wakes up missing him on the other side of the bed, the way he did the first three months in witness protection. Maybe she keeps pictures of him around, as he had for her.

The only thing he can do is ask.

* * *

With a sweep of clouds, night falls over Coral Palms. Jake still looks at Amy as if she hangs a star in the sky every morning. Their heartbeats have since settled down.

Jimmy Figgis has once and for all been apprehended. They can go home to Brooklyn, to a badge strung around Jake’s neck and a hand intertwined with Amy’s. They can return to inside jokes and breakfast in bed. They can have everything again.

Amy’s voice gently jars the quiet. “Sorry again for, uh, your leg.” She trembles next to him, edging closer to the ambulance where he sits. Eyes full of apology, she catches and holds his gaze for far longer than he would have expected.

If Jake had another chance, he would go through all of it again. He would relive the pain of the arrest, the echo of gunfire in the air as he collapsed to the ground. She’s worth it, Jake knows, because the pierce of the bullet through his skin was nothing different than the overdrawn longing, the doubt of an open deadline, that he’s felt over these six months.

“Hey, it’s fine. We pledged to serve and protect. You were only doing your job,” Jake rationalizes, clasping Amy in their first proper hug in ages. “You’re not in the wrong. No need to apologize.”

There are tears soaking into Jake’s shirt, probably from both of them. It doesn’t matter, they mutually and silently agree.

Amy throws her arms over Jake’s shoulders, making up for lost time, and pulls him into a kiss. Jake’s stomach flips; he’s on so many medications for the gunshot wound, he’s been awake for _too_ long, so he wasn’t exactly fine to begin with. Right now, though, adrenaline courses through both their bloodstreams.

“I missed you. So much,” Amy says, breaking apart from Jake to confess.

“Hey, you think I felt any differently?” Jake grins, pulling his girlfriend (girlfriend! he can call her that again!) ever closer with one arm on her waist.

All the medics on the ambulance learn to give Jake and Amy 一 nicknamed the lovebirds 一 a little space. When the EMT comes by to change Jake’s bandages, she walks right into yet another of their makeout sessions. “I swear, they’re inseparable,” she laughs, raising an eyebrow.

“Damn right they are,” Charles remarks. Amy rolls her eyes at him before Jake tugs her closer and initiates another kiss. He’s under strict doctor’s orders to refrain from sex for a month, so they can’t fool around any, but they get as close as they can.

* * *

“Ames? Ames! You there?”

Jake’s voice is strained but loud, calling from who-knows-where, as Amy’s eyes widen and she nervously runs all over his apartment. It isn’t even that _big,_ for heaven’s sake, but her heart races a little more with every empty room she enters. He is somewhere, he needs her; that’s the only thought running through her mind, truthfully speaking-

“I’m in the bathroom!”

Amy’s chest tightens with anticipation, her mind coming with idea after idea of what could have _possibly_ happened to her boyfriend (oh god, oh god, he just got home and now’s he’s hurt or worse) because she really shouldn’t have left him alone. Jake Peralta and his one crutch have been hobbling around the apartment for the last two days, and he was doing just fine, so she just figured he needed some alone time 一 he’s been through a lot in the last six months, right?

She clutches the doorknob, cold in her hand, and turns it as if in slow motion.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re here, babe.” Jake waves from the bathtub. “Can you help me wash my hair? With the leg wound and all...”

Amy exhales, one hand over her heart as she sighs, stepping forward and sitting down by the tub. “Please don’t do that again.”

“ Do what again?”

“Just, uh, when you call me, be more clear,” Amy replies, still a little bit breathless. “I just … didn’t know what the matter was. You just got home, and I, and I - I need some time to get over the idea of you-”

“The idea of me,” Jake repeats slowly, eyes darkening.

“I, um, need to get over the idea of you … missing.”

“Missing?”

Amy pinches the nape of her neck, trying to keep from stammering. “You were gone for so long, I got used to being scared for your life. So, uh, I just need some time to adjust, that’s all.”

“Hey,” Jake coaxes, cradling Amy’s head in his hands. “I get it. I just got home. Neither of us can really cope with everything happening all at once.”

“Thanks, babe,” Amy grins, ruffling a hand through Jake’s frosted tips. “We’ll just work on getting back to our old lives, kay? Now, what were you saying about your hair?”

Jake blushes, ears reddening. “This sounds dumb, but I can’t exactly _maneuver_ around like I used to. You know, since you shot me in the leg and all.”

He ends his sentence smirking, as Amy reaches for the shampoo bottle and pours some into her palm. “No problem, babe. Anything for you.”

She lathers the shampoo into his hair, remarking how terribly bleach-blond Jake’s hair has become since he relocated, to which he retorts ‘I don’t exactly see _you_ going into WITSEC.’ Laughing, Amy recounts how the Nine-Nine’s been since Jake and Holt went to Coral Palms.

“Boyle and I wore the same outfit to work,” she giggles, trying to keep shampoo out of Jake’s eyes as he turns his head to talk. “It was bad. It was the one time Charles actually won a game of ‘who wore it best.’ Not my proudest moment, I have to say.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad to me,” Jake banters, feeling a well-missed and familiar contentedness settle in his heart. “I’m sure it’d look a whole lot better on the floor..?”

“Wow, the quality of your flirting’s gone down since Florida.”

“Sorry, I didn’t exactly have a way to _practice!”_

“Well, I guess I should be glad for that, hm? Come on, we should wash the shampoo out of your hair now.” Amy gingerly turns the faucet, trying to adjust the temperature of the water. “There.”

“Thanks, babe.”

A few minutes and a discussion about bath bombs later, Jake is safely tucked into bed, his hair rumpled. Amy walks into the bedroom, holding a bagful of medications and counting pills. “Here, take one white tablet.”

“Ugh, I still have to take pain meds,” Jake grumbles, crossing his arms. Dressed in a faded Mets sweatshirt and buried in blankets, he’s awfully exhausted of not being able to experience Brooklyn the way he used to.

“Sorry about that,” Amy murmurs, “since I’m really the reason you’re in pain in the first place.”

“Hey! Don’t say that. You’re the reason I’m not still in Florida right now, driving ATVs around a hot parking lot and ducking into a storage compartment.”

“Storage compartment?”

“I had a place to work on the Figgis case, as well as to see you-”

Amy’s eyebrow furrows. “Excuse me?”

“I drove a couple counties over so I could print out a picture of you from Gina’s Instagram. It sounds weird, I know, but that photograph really got me through those six months.”

“Oh, Jake.” Amy feels as if her breath has been knocked out. She kept pictures of Jake around, of course, but she wasn’t at the same risk he was. Lying down on the bed side by side with her boyfriend, Amy’s heart stirs a little as she runs her fingers through his hair, still damp and lavender-scented. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

“That makes two of us.”

Her heart doesn’t exactly know which rhythm to play, what with the dizziness in her head and the softness in Jake’s eyes. They lie next to each other, foreheads touching, but they both _know_ kissing leads to making out leads to sex.

Fuck, it’s just unfair. Amy pulls Jake closer to her with one hand, lowering her head to kiss his neck. It’s been six months; everyone has a breaking point, and Jake’s pretty sure he’s already passed his. This is too much for his addled brain to handle. The intimacy, the heat, the whine she releases when he shifts away from her … it’s all really good.

Amy finds out _how_ good it is once she presses her hips to Jake’s, cheekily reaching to Jake’s frosted tips and tugging. A groan fills the room, his head spinning and double-checking this isn’t just another dream (when Amy finds about the Florida dreams, she laughs and offers to re-enact each and every one, but that’s another story for another day.)

“Please, Ames, just for my sake, no more,” Jake moans. “You know what the doctor said-”

“You know you’re cleared for for _some_ stuff, right?” Amy smirks. Jake’s eyes widen at the prospect, quietly cursing in the open air. “Now, let me repay you for Coral Palms.”

With that, Amy pulls Jake’s boxers off in one swift motion, thoroughly enjoying the groan he makes. Within a second 一 neither Jake or Amy can wait any longer; it’s been six months without each other, after all 一 she starts. Jake curses, hands gripping the sheets, while Amy uses the slightest bit of her teeth to scrape against him and takes him deeper, her tongue circling him.

“Ames, fuck 一 so good, I, I 一 Christ, how did I forget how good this fel-”

Amy, ever so terribly, pulls away at the last second, licking softly at the tip and eliciting a few more expletives from her boyfriend. She takes pity on him after a minute, continuing as usual, until Jake comes in a heated series of groans and stutters.

His face is flush, eyes blown. It’s been far too long, he thinks, reaching for Amy’s shoulders and pressing his forehead to hers once again while they kiss.

“Welcome home, Peralta,” she sighs once they pull apart.

“If that’s what you call a welcome, Ames, I should leave more often.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for reading!! comments/kudos are my will to write, so any would be great <33


End file.
